#property relations

The Internet of Some Corporation's Fully-Secured Things

Modern capitalist society, from the everyday activities that constitute its ‘content’ to the social and political relations of command that seek to function as their ‘form’, is dedicated to the accumulation of capital by means of the private property of the means of production by one class – that is, the bourgeoisie’s successful claim to the juridical right to appropriate the surplus-value produced in the distinctively ‘unequal equality’ of the wage labour-capital relation. Any movement to transform modern societies in which the capitalist mode of production is dominant must therefore reckon accounts with this fundamental organizing principle, which continually produces, reproduces and overdetermines the relations of subalternity that traverse capitalist society, both within and beyond strictly economic relations. In the first and not the last instance, such a revolutionary movement must challenge the dominance of one minoritarian class, on the basis of the interests of all other classes in the society, by addressing directly and forcefully what the Communist Manifesto refers to as the ‘property question’, the material basis for subalternity in all its forms.

Where the control resides, there resides the function of ownership, whatever the fictions of ownership may be.

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home. This gives some indication of the difficult relationship in which the individual now stands to his property, as long as he still possesses anything at all. The trick is to keep in view, and to express, the fact that private property no longer belongs to one, in the sense that consumer goods have become potentially so abundant that no individual has the right to cling to the principle of their limitation; but that one must nevertheless have possessions, if one is not to sink into that dependence and need which serves the blind perpetuation of property relations. But the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too; and the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing with a bad consciences to keep what they have. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.